 Okay, something extremely dangerous and worrying is happening across Europe right now. Fascists are coming back to power. In Italy, a neo-fascist Georgia Meloni is set to become Prime Minister. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban has openly started making neo-Nazi statements. In Poland, the ruling party has shed its center right disguise and turned hard right. One Polish minister had this to say about Georgia Meloni's victory in Italy. The right wing in EU is growing in strength. We will regain the EU for the nations of the EU state members. We will defeat the communists, leftism and the LGBT lobby, all those who destroy our civilization. You couldn't find a more fascist statement than this. In France, neo-fascist Marine Le Pen came very close to winning the elections earlier this year. In the Czech Republic, which is already ruled by a right-wing government, neo-fascists have made big gains in local elections in September. In Portugal, the extreme right-wing party Chega has moved from the fringe to becoming the third largest party in the country. Now these leaders and political parties, they say that they have nothing to do with fascism. But their parties are actually full of people who praise Hitler, Mussolini, the fascists, the Nazis. And they're full of foot soldiers who are always ready to do violence against immigrants, against women, against gay and trans people, anyone who they think are the other. It's a chilling replay of what happened in Europe almost a hundred years ago. We are seeing an Italian... ...with the defeat of the Triple Alliance of Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary. The war might have gone on for longer, but for an uprising inside Germany, which forced the country's hereditary monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, to abdicate and flee the country. The new government that took charge declared Germany to be a republic and immediately surrendered. The Great War had cost the lives of nearly 10 million soldiers. Two million of them were German. When the German soldiers who had survived returned from the battlefields, they were welcomed back as heroes, even though their country had surrendered. Most refused to believe that they had lost the war. Instead, they believed that they had been led down by a Dostos Legenda or a stab in the back of the brave German soldier by Jewish bankers and industrialists, socialists and Republicans who had overthrown the Kaiser. This is just the beginning of a growing sense of humiliation and resentment. The worst was yet to come. That happened here at the Grand Palace at Versailles, where the parties to the war arrived to sign the most important peace treaty of this First World War. It was a brutal, humiliating peace for Germany. Germany had to stop all defence production, dismantle its air force, whittle down its navy and cut down its army to just 100,000 soldiers. Of the 1 million soldiers who had returned home, 90% were suddenly disbanded. Most importantly, Germany had to pay damages to the victorious nations of 31.4 billion dollars in 1922 prices. In today's prices, that is equal to $442 billion. The German government started paying the first installment of the reparations early in 1922, but very soon it ran out of money and by the end of 1922, it defaulted. In response, the French armies occupied the Ruhr Valley, Germany's industrial heartland. The aim was to take away whatever the German factories were producing. The German government asked the workers of Ruhr to go on strike, promising to keep paying their wages. But with no money in its coffers, with no output taking place, factories not running, the only way the German government could keep its promise was by printing money. Germany was already facing hyperinflation due to the shortages of the war, but the money printing would make that look like child's play. In January 1923, a loaf of bread already cost a prohibitive 250 marks. By the end of that year, it had shot up to 200,000 million marks. The only way for the German government to deal with this crisis was to send the workers back to the Ruhr Valley to start the factories again, given to French demands and start paying reparations once again. It would not go down well with the war veterans and extreme nationalists in Germany. One man would use this opportunity to make a name for himself. But Hitler's first attempt to stage a coup failed and he was sentenced to be imprisoned for five years, but had to serve only nine months. He would use this time to write his poisonous manifesto, Mein Kampf, or My Struggle. But prison was no struggle for Hitler. He lived in great comfort. Ernst Hanf Stangel, Hitler's close friend who helped publish Mein Kampf, visited Hitler often in prison. When he entered Hitler's cell, it was as if he had walked into a delicatessen. There was fruit and there were flowers, wine and other alcoholic beverages, ham, sausage, cake, boxes of chocolates and much more. Why should we know what Hitler's prison life was like? Because it shows us that those who wielded power in Germany were already treating him with kid gloves, even though he tried to overthrow the government. Perhaps the reason he was getting such preferential treatment was because he had a lot of wealthy backers. But the average German was still not interested in what Hitler had to say and the reason for that was that things were improving. Why? Because the US and the UK had realized that you could not push Germany to the brink, push it over the edge, make it bankrupt and expect Europe to stabilize. So Germany's reparations, its dues were brought down and American banks lent it huge amounts of money to finance its recovery. By 1927, life in Germany was as colorful as anywhere else in Europe. Germans began to forget the humiliations of Versailles and the French occupation. But then in 1929, Wall Street crashed, bringing about the Great Depression. Now American banks which had lent a lot of money to Germany wanted their money back immediately because they were short of cash now and without American money, German industry ran into a standstill. Overnight, about 600,000 Germans lost their jobs and that number would rise to a whopping 6 million in another 2-3 years. The government became unpopular as the unemployed turned towards the communists whose influence spread across Germany. This alarmed Germany's industrialists. Since they could not strengthen the unpopular ruling parties, they put their weight behind Hitler's Nazis. Hitler's anti-Semitism had always had a few takers in Germany but they had been a small minority. The Great Depression caused a general banking crisis in Germany as well and as it happened, there were two big banks, Danath Bank and Dresner Bank, which merged to increase liquidity. They were headed by a respected German banker called Jakob Goldschmidt. Now, because Danath and Dresner were in trouble, they were asking companies to return their money and those companies which were exposed to Danath and Dresner were more likely to sack people and more likely to cut wages. So this came as a tailor-made situation for Hitler and the Nazis to push their anti-Semitic, anti-Jewish propaganda. Jewish bankers were portrayed as villains, deliberately destroying the hapless German businessmen. In this crisis, the German people had lost all faith in their government. There are two paths open to them, one with Hitler, the other with the communists. Now understandably, the powerful, the rich didn't want to support the communists so they moved towards Hitler. They backed and propped him up. He got great press, a lot of funding and on the other side, the communists were vilified and they got absolutely no money. In the 1928 elections before the crisis, Hitler's Nazis had just got 2.6% of the votes and the Communist Party led by Ernst Hallmann got 10.6%. In 1930, after the Great Depression had taken root, the Nazis jumped to 18.3%, the communists also gained slightly to rise to 13.1%. Over the next two years, the rich and the powerful would stand fully behind Hitler, helping the Nazis double their vote share while the Communist Party stagnated. But the Nazis were still not able to form a majority government and Hitler couldn't become the chancellor. Hitler's Tom Troopers unleashed violence on the streets, attacking Jews and communists. The police helped by targeting Communist Party rallies yet between July and November 1932 when another round of elections were held, the Nazis lost 2.4 million votes while the communists gained 700,000 votes. Germany's industrialists and conservative politicians were extremely alarmed. They now hatched a plan with Hitler to become chancellor even without a majority. They put pressure on Germany's president, the war hero Paul von Hindenburg, who had till then insisted on holding elections till someone got a majority. Hindenburg gave in and invited Hitler to become chancellor. Within a few weeks, Hitler would get a perfect excuse to seize absolute power. On 27th February 1933, the German parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire. Enough evidence now to show that it had been secretly organized by the Nazis, but Hitler blamed it on the Communist Party. The timing of the Reichstag fire is especially important because within a few days, Germany would go to elections once again and the martial law allowed Hitler and his police to persecute the opposition, especially the communists and they were not allowed to campaign. Only the Nazis could successfully campaign, despite that the Nazis could not get full majority. But Hitler would use the Reichstag fire to give himself emergency powers. The Communist Party had won 81 seats in the parliament, but the members were all arrested or had to go into hiding. Within a few months, Hitler banned all opposition parties and in the next elections held in November 1933, only Nazi party candidates were allowed to fight the elections. Hitler had subverted democracy with the help of the corporates, industrialists and the elites and suspended democracy altogether. Now, why is this history important? It's important because it's repeating itself again in Europe and the rest of the world. There's the same economic crisis as it happened in the 1920s and 30s, the same levels of high unemployment that was seen in the 1930s. If in the 1930s, people blamed the Jewish bankers and the Jewish people, today they blame immigrants, especially from Muslim countries. In the 1930s, the socialists and communists were called the enemies of the nation. Today, liberals are seen as opponents of national pride. But this message of hatred didn't spread on its own at that time and it's not spreading on its own right now. It is being supported by corporate money and corporate media and its hate-filled violent foot soldiers are being treated with kid gloves just as they were a century ago. If industrialists and bankers backed Hitler and Mussolini in the 1920s and 30s, today it's neoliberal capital, finance capital, which is popping up right-wing neo-fascist regimes, right-wing neo-fascist political parties, both by backing them financially and giving them a free platform on corporate-controlled media. As it was back then, it is the same right now that whenever capitalism is in crisis, capital will always back fascism rather than have socialism as an alternative. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. 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